Hellfire (8 page)
‘I know a bin can have an IED in it, but what’s the significance of the windows?’
‘The IRA won’t piss off the locals. They’ll tell them there’s a bomb in a bin. That’s why the place is deserted. The windows are open so the pressure from the blast doesn’t blow them in. I may be wrong, but this stinks of a set-up.
‘It couldn’t be a booby-trap bomb because our guys won’t even touch a twenty-pound note on the floor in Crossmaglen and the IRA know that. The bomb would have to be set off by a command wire or remote control. I couldn’t see any wires, but I didn’t see a living soul down there either, except for the lads and their football. Stand by, Scottie, I’m about to transmit again.’
I told One Zero Alpha the form. There was a pause, then he came back to me; he didn’t want to go near the place, but did want to question the three lads.
I told him how to corner them by moving a brick out onto the Dundalk Road first and another down the alleyway.
Scottie watched One Zero Charlie by the Dundalk Road and I surveyed the three lads as the men of One Zero Alpha moved towards them.
‘One Zero Charlie, this is Gazelle Five. The lads are headed your way.’ I could see them break into a run towards the Dundalk Road.
‘This is One Zero Charlie cutting them off.’ I could hear his breathing quicken as he ran.
I turned to Scottie. ‘And that’s why you need to know where everyone is and what their callsigns are.’
The lads ran back into the cul-de-sac and were promptly confronted by the men of One Zero Alpha.
Zero One Bravo was covering the alleyway and Zero One Charlie the entrance to the Dundalk Road. The three lads were cornered.
‘It’s making sense to me now,’ he said.
‘You don’t need to gawk at our boys,’ I told Scottie, ‘because they’re not going to shoot themselves. You need to be looking ahead of them and on their flanks. That’s where trouble’s going to come from if it’s out there. Take a look, for instance, across the Dundalk Road and across that first field there. There’s an inverted T-shaped tree line. Do you see it?’
‘Got it,’ Scottie said.
‘Keep an eye on that place, buddy, because that’s an awesome sniping position.’
‘Why?’
‘It’s got a good clear shot, cover from above and a great escape route, making it hard for us to follow anyone who bugs out of there.’
‘How do you know this shit, Ed?’
‘Because I’ve been a foot soldier. I see things from up here. But I also see them from down there.’
The radio crackled. ‘Gazelle Five, this is One Zero Alpha. The three lads are local teenagers and the way they’re behaving makes our copper suspect there
is
an IED in the area. He knows these guys. They’re usually pretty gobby, but today butter wouldn’t fucking melt…Our job’s done, Gazelle Five. We’re heading back out onto the Dundalk Road and back to the station, over.’
‘Wait out.’ I explained to Scottie that we now had to go through the routine all over again, covering them on the journey back.
‘One Zero Alpha, Bravo and Charlie, this is Gazelle Five. Your only threat is from a wood line to the east of One Zero Charlie. It’s across the field on the other side of the Dundalk Road. We’ll keep an eye out for any snipers, over.’
‘Thanks, mate, over.’
‘No worries, buddy, out.’
We turned and headed back the way we’d come.
It was my second tour of Northern Ireland. My first had been in 1993-not counting the time I had deployed there on the ground as a Para in 1987-and this time it was a very different ball of wax. In 1993, when I’d been in Belfast as part of City Flight, covering foot patrols in and around Belfast, I’d flown with ex-infanteers, AAC guys who like me had previously been soldiers. They’d all had a natural feel for the tactical picture on the ground and it showed in the way they flew. Somehow or other, this skill had been lost in the four years I’d been away.
My first unit after graduating from Middle Wallop, 664 Squadron, 9 Regiment Army Air Corps, was located at Dishforth in Yorkshire. With it, I’d been on exercises in Belize, Kenya and the United States.
In the five years I’d been an operational pilot I was having the best fun it was possible to have with my clothes on.
As a newly qualified AAC helicopter pilot, there were two platforms I could aspire to: the Gazelle or the Lynx. Most elected for the Lynx because it was armed and as aggressive a flying machine as the army possessed at the time, though that wasn’t saying much. I went for the Gazelle because it formed the heart of the AAC’s covert ‘Special Forces Flight’.
I loved the Gazelle. It was the sports car of the skies while the Lynx was the family saloon. The Gazelle, being a two-seater, could sneak in almost anywhere, which is why the Special Forces liked it. And it had excellent performance; it could get up to 13,000 feet-quite a height for a helicopter-no problem.
Because it was small and made of ‘plastic and Araldite’ it was extremely hard to detect on radar when it was down in the weeds. It was also an extremely useful surveillance platform, because you
could hang things off it-Nightsun searchlights and thermal-imaging cameras for starters-and at stand-off ranges, because of its size, it was pretty difficult to detect from the ground.
I’d been doing everything I could to tick the boxes that would get me selected for the Special Forces Flight. I’d done my Aircraft Commander’s Course, which allowed me to fly in the left-hand seat, and I’d racked up as many flying hours as I could. A couple of tours in Northern Ireland couldn’t hurt either, I figured.
The second time I got out there, in December 1996, I’d found the place in a mess.
Someone who’s new in-theatre, who doesn’t know the callsigns or the flying regulations, is usually put through a routine known as ‘supervised duties’ until he or she is proficient with the set-up. Although I didn’t need to sign up to supervised duties because I’d previously been in-theatre, I did so nonetheless, because the place we were flying out of, Bessbrook Mill, was extremely tight-it was the busiest base in the province-and had very strict flying procedures. I wanted to be sure I knew the ropes. I reckoned a stint of supervised duties couldn’t hurt.
I flew out on my first sortie with a qualified commander. Tully sat in the left-hand seat; I sat in the right. We were called out to Crossmaglen to assist in a ‘P-Check’: a multiple on the ground had gone into a staunchly Republican area to haul in a suspect for questioning; we were to provide top-cover for them. We’d barely arrived over the suspect’s house when the radio sparked and I heard the multiple commander’s voice.
‘One Zero Alpha, leaving Crossmaglen now.’
I glanced at Tully. No reaction. I picked up the ‘patrol trace’-the map that indicated the route the multiple would take. There was nothing marked, no tasking; merely a callsign, the one we’d just heard. When I looked at the image on the TV screen in front of Tully’s knees, I realised that he wasn’t scouting ahead or to the sides
of the multiple for possible threats; he’d got the camera trained on the multiple itself.
‘What are you doing?’ I asked.
‘I’m filming the multiple. Why?’
‘Filming their deaths more like,’ I said under my breath. I got on the radio. ‘One Zero Alpha, this is Gazelle Four. Go firm, go firm.’
I watched on the screen as fifteen men dropped to the ground.
Tully looked horrified. ‘What are you doing?’
I told him and in no uncertain terms. Now we could see where our multiple was, we were at least able to identify who the good guys were.
As I circled above them, I asked One Zero Alpha to point out his VPs for me. He immediately said they were approaching Sniper Alley, a known hot-spot. I spent several good, long moments studying the street for things that shouldn’t have been there: bins, skips, tipper trucks, command wires and suspicious-looking vehicles. I saw nothing that raised my hackles and signalled as much. Afterwards, he thanked me for what I’d done, saying it had been an ‘awesome patrol’. In my book there was nothing awesome about it at all; it was supposed to be routine.
The problem was confirmed, when, over the next week or so, I flew with several other pilots who were every bit as lax as Tully had been in the way they covered multiples on the ground. It wasn’t their fault; they didn’t know any better. Realising I wasn’t going to make myself popular by sticking my nose in, I decided to speak to the RQHI-the regiment’s qualified helicopter instructor, the guy who defined the way we flew. James told me he was aware of the problem and said it was a knowledge-based deficiency; it’s why we had supervised duties. I told him the best, perhaps the only, thing to do was to write a document that standardised air-ground-air procedure. James told me to ‘crack on’.
So I wrote it all down: how a multiple functioned and what it might be called upon to do (P-checks, vehicle checkpoints,
ambushes, searches, whatever). I then calibrated the threat it faced in any given situation and put the two together. The final ingredient was what we could supply in our Gazelles-how we could detect and alert them to IRA command wires, dustbin bombs, snipers, ambushes and so on. I then combined the ground and air pictures and came up with a set of procedures-kind of a ‘how to provide multiple support by numbers’ that anybody arriving in-theatre for the first time could pick up, read and follow.
When I’d finished, I ran it past some infanteer mates. They had no idea how much support our helicopters were able to provide them with.
Heartened by their reaction, I took my draft document to the squadron’s 2i/c.
‘Very good,’ he said, flicking through it as I stood in front of his desk. ‘But if you’ll allow me to say so, Sergeant Macy, it needs a bit of a polish-i’s dotted and t’s crossed, that kind of thing. You don’t mind, do you, if I…?’
‘Be my guest,’ I said. I’d written it as a functional document, not a piece of Pulitzer Prize-winning literature. If someone wanted to tart it up for the brass, I was delighted.
A few weeks later, when I was due to go back to the UK, I’d asked the 2i/c if he’d finished tarting it up; he told me he still needed to do some work on it. He’d let me know when it was done.
That was the last I thought about it until we were practising multiple support procedures over Yorkshire a few months later and my co-pilot mentioned that there was an excellent document on the subject he’d read while deployed in Northern Ireland. ‘It covers all this stuff, Ed. I’ll give you a copy.’
As I flicked through it, I was delighted to see that 95 per cent of what I’d written had been left alone-it really had just had its i’s dotted and t’s crossed. Then I saw the 2i/c’s name and signature at the bottom.
I gave a rueful smile. The important thing was that it was out there.
It would have a particular resonance almost ten years later in the dusty wastes of Afghanistan.
Then the UK MoD went and ordered the Apache.
It had won out against its rivals in a massive procurement deal-for a cool £4.13 billion, the Army Air Corps would acquire sixty-seven AgustaWestland-built machines, simulators and equipment to operate them. They’d look the same as their American counterparts, but would be very different on the inside. Instead of the standard General Electric turboshaft engines of the Boeing-built originals, the WAH-64D, as the British variant was known, would be equipped with RTM322s-built by Rolls-Royce-with almost 40 per cent more power. The Apache that Chopper Palmer had organised for me to sit in at the International Air Tattoo, which was impressive enough, had been revamped as a total thoroughbred.
What to do?
The Apache was due in AAC service in 2003, which technically gave me time to deploy with the SAS and still left time to apply for Apache selection. The latter, not surprisingly, had become the hottest ticket in the Air Corps. Every pilot with half an eye on the top rung of the ladder would put his name down for a place on the conversion course. To ensure I got there, I knew I’d need to be way ahead of the curve.
Fortunately, I had a plan.
11 SEPTEMBER 2000
British Army Training Unit Suffield (BATUS), Alberta, Canada
My Gazelle was parked in the middle of the Canadian prairie. The sun was high and the sky was clear blue. Somewhere above me I could hear a lone bird calling. Lying on my back, I scanned the heavens, trying in vain to locate it. No matter. I popped another piece of straw between my teeth, closed my eyes and tried to doze, but I was out of luck there too.
Fuck me, I thought, didn’t these Pathfinders ever put a sock in it?
Next to me was a Special Forces Land Rover filled with three lads from the Pathfinder Platoon-a small unit designed and trained to fight behind enemy lines; 16 Air Assault Brigade’s equivalent of the SAS.
They were swapping stories about how they’d have solved the previous year’s Kosovo conflict. It was full of harmless machismo-but it went on endlessly. Two of the guys favoured covertly parachuting behind the lines; the third was adamant that an ‘infil’ by land was better. Both ended with a bloody assault on Slobodan Milosevic’s heavily armed Belgrade headquarters. The outcome, needless to say, was a foregone conclusion: Brits one, Serbs nil.
I was in 3 Regiment now, on a two-month exercise fighting a tank battalion, day in day out to get ourselves onto a war footing.
My flight commander, co-pilot and co-ABFAC, Dom, groaned beside me. ‘Can’t they just shut the fuck up for a moment? Some of us didn’t get much sleep last night.’
‘Paras,’ I told him. ‘A gobbier breed you couldn’t hope to meet. I used to be one.’
‘Don’t I know it, Staff?’ Dom said. ‘And your gob is going to get us into trouble one of these days.’ He rolled over and blocked his ears.
Dom was a captain and I was a staff sergeant, the 2i/c of our flight. Dom was public school, vertically challenged and took no shit from anyone, not even me. He was a soldiers’ officer and always considered his men before himself. He wasn’t the most gifted pilot, but he more than made up for that in the brains department.
We were having a break from kicking tanky arse and were concentrating instead on the fine art of Forward Air Controlling-FACing, as it was politely known in the trade. The Pathfinders were FACs-Forward Air Controllers. Dom and I were Airborne FACs or ABFACs. We did exactly what they did, but from the comfort of our Gazelles. The Pathfinders thought we were a couple of soft pussies, but I’d done the stripped-down Land Rover routine before my accident and knew where I’d rather be.